Community voice

How to: core approaches

Plan and build a clear but flexible framework for collaboration, especially with community champions that agrees shared aims and objectives sets parameters and agrees the frequency and regularity of involvement.

Listening to your communities can take a wide range of forms:

• Community Panels – either ongoing or for specific commissions
• Cultural Ambassadors or Connectors (CBD Case Study)
• Facebook groups, either public or closed
• Inviting individuals from local communities or groups to contribute to team or consortium discussions

Working with non-arts groups and starting with questions or issues relevant to communities rather than with ‘the art’ or ‘culture’ leads to different ways of working, rooted in what matters to people. They can work out how art or culture might help. 

Offering the right support at the right times to co-build creation and share power is important. Develop relationships of mutual trust by doing some of these things:

• Think about the language you use and make sure it doesn’t exclude, minoritize or ‘other’– avoid terms like ‘hard to reach’
• Consider the locations you use for meetings, how rooms are set up and how you present ideas
• Be transparent and honest about what you can and can’t do in that context, including about project budgets
• Think about the differentials in confidence and power different people might feel and how you can equalise those
• Ensure clear feedback and communication about the development of projects
• Build capacity for working together in CPPs, artists and communities – panels and groups that reflect and deliver a commission or a series of workshops together form connections and habits that provide informal routes for community voice to be heard. 
• Shared decision-making requires clarity about the fit of the project, the team working on it and on creating appropriate spaces for discussion and decision. Decision-making can take a range of forms from voting to consensus-based decisions.
  
   

Dig deeper

Find out more about a range of ways to share decision-making in Shared Decision-Making Tips, tools and case studies from Creative People and Places projects by Louise White for MB Associates 

Read about power and the can pose when building in community voices in Chrissie Tiller’s Power Up Report  

The programme has built upon a history of socially engaged and community arts practice. Francois Matarasso’s A Restless Art is a great starting point for finding out more. 

Several case studies in 64M Artists’ report Cultural Democracy In Practice come from Creative People and Places. 64M Artists have also drawn connections to ideas of ‘everyday creativity’.